How do we live well, without harming the planet, other people, or our own future prospects? That seems to me to be one of the central issues we now face.
In having a conversation earlier about product-service systems, the substitution of access for ownership, and the sustainability implications of a shift towards services which provide the experiences and relationships we want without bring more stuff into our lives, it occurred to me that we already have one great, recent example: Netflix.
Netflix is a product-service system for DVDs. By signing up for the service, you are able to rent movies you want to see, without having to own them. So far, so good, and much like a traditional video store. However, Netflix goes one better on sustainability terms, by letting users order movies online and delivering the DVDs via the regular postal mail. Now I'm sure they made the decision to do this based entirely on cost savings, but as it turns out, there are real sustainability savings involved as well: by not having a store to which I drive to get the videos, the planet is spared the impacts of a retail outlet, as well as all those trips back and forth, each of which uses (though I haven't run the numbers, I'm sure this is true) far more fuel and generates far more pollution than do the daily rounds of the local mail carrier (who is, after all, making the trip anyway).
Of course, even better would be eliminating the DVD altogether. As one study showed, "Downloading 56 minutes of music is more than two and a half times less resource intensive than going to a shop to buy a CD, even if the music is burnt on to a CD-R." Now, if you eliminate the step of burning it onto a DVD, downloading a movie would have a clear environmental advantage over even having it be mailed.
The biggest remaining problem would be the currently deeply unsustainable nature of consumer electronics, which leach vampire energy , operate inefficiently and leave behind them a toxic stream of waste. But we're already making great strides towards producing a green computer, and there's every reason to believe that with committed effort, we can create cradle-to-cradle, extremely efficient electronics.
If those electronics were then powered by clean energy, we'd be a long way towards getting the experience we want (being able to crash on the couch with our loved ones and watch a movie) at the sort of reduced ecological footprint the planet demands.
Obviously, some services are much harder to dematerialize. It's not going to get noticeably easier to reduce the massive impacts of jet travel anytime soon, for instance, and so, for the moment, having the experience of, say, a foreign vacation still requires us to engage in planetary ruin, with at best the worst effects mitigated around the edges.
That said, it's important to remember that we don't have to achieve perfect sustainability in all the aspects of our life simultaneously and at once. While reducing our overall impact by 90% by 2050 seems insanely daunting, if we can make relatively big strides in certain areas (say housing, personal transportation, food and consumer goods) through a mix of better technologies, compact living and the substitution of services for products, we can buy ourselves the time to come up with better answers for some of the thornier questions facing us.
This doesn't require magic or alien intervention. It does require changed thinking about how we tackle the material demands created by our nearly-universal desire to live the good life.
Indeed, it seems increasingly likely to me that with new thinking a new kind of life could actually be lived -- a modern, affluent life, sufficiently re-envisioned and designed with a full understanding of the tools already at our disposal -- which would demand an ecological footprint that is half, a third, a quarter, even a fifth of that of the average affluent North American lifestyle today, while offering an improved quality of life, and probably even financial benefit to those living it.
Since one of the planet's most pressing needs is giving people an idea of a sustainable future for themselves and their families which doesn't involve a retreat back to the Middle Ages (since, in fact, such an answer is no answer at all, it seems to me that trying to imagine, describe, build and sell this new kind of life should be pretty near the top of the environmental to-do list.
Any effort to retrofit completely unsustainable lives with technological quick fixes, tail-pipe solutions and lifestyle props is probably bound to fail. The 1990s affluent suburban, conspicuous-consumption lifestyle is itself a big part of the problem. To try to provide the planet with ex-urban sprawl, McMansions, fast food and SUVs, but in a slightly more sustainable way is to seek, as Thoreau would say, improved means to an unimproved end.
I believe that are good enough designers and innovators to create a better way of living, and that, with an improved end in mind, the means will reveal themselves in the tools, models and ideas we already have at hand, and are just beginning to fully understand. And since the lifestyles of those of us in the developed world are to some degree implicated in nearly every major planetary problem, from climate change to civil wars, to improve the end towards which we are working is to offer a lever to transform the wider world as well.
Call it the Archimedes principle of sustainable globalization.
So order a movie this weekend, pop some locally-grown corn, and, as the previews roll, do a little day-dreaming about the end towards which you really want to be working, and the life you really want to live.
